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With the woeful Golden Globes, the death of the truly remarkable David Bowie, the media uproar over actor Sean Penn’s so-called interview in Rolling Stone magazine with notorious Mexican drug overlord Joaquín Guzmán (El Chapo) and finally the Oscar nominations, this has been quite a week to ponder the reach of celebrity culture.

Let’s start with the Golden Globes. There should be a medically certifiable psychological condition known as Award Show Shame. And not just for failed host Ricky Gervais. For all of us.

Simply put, you feel, well, like an ass for spending hours watching barely articulate celebrities, some of whom have grounds to sue their stylists (breasts pulled very far apart until the sternum resembles a smoothly paved roadway are clearly the new cleavage) gush about the honour of being recognized by their peers.

In the case of the Golden Globes last Sunday, these stylistically engineered stars (the New York Post estimated the costs to get an actress red carpet-ready at upwards of $44,000 U.S., not counting the rented bling) were “drunker” than expected, one dazzled newbie reported online. They were also, for the most part, incredibly boring.

We’ve lowered the bar on what is impressive or even acceptable in onstage award moments. Why for instance, laud host Gervais for nastily calling out notorious anti-Semite Mel Gibson in an introduction when the truth is, Mel Gibson shouldn’t be called upon at all. He doesn’t deserve to be rehabilitated publicly, even with a savage joke.

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And most of the acceptance speeches were embarrassing. Even the duo of Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence was less than dynamic. They were funny but carelessly so, as if any tossed tidbit of humour was enough for the audience.

Don’t misunderstand. My increased loathing of the celebrity culture and all the ways it diminishes us (host Gervais’s contemptuous patter may have elicited some laughs but it also made you actually feel emotionally bad) in no way means I don’t adore the product.

I love movies so much that it’s not unusual for me to see two a week. I’ve marvelled at Brie Larson’s heart wrenching turn as a mom in captivity in the Canadian-Irish co-production Room, swooned over the investigative journalism depicted in Spotlight, laughed in outrage over the explanations in The Big Short about how Wall Street ripped everyone off, admired Bryan Cranston and Helen Mirren in Trumbo, and even though it hurt, endured for almost two hours the immersive and horrific sounds of a gas chamber in Son of Saul.

It’s everything else that makes me despair. A culture (around an art) that was always supposed to be merely a fun diversion (stars — their loves and lives, their clothes and cleanses) has swallowed us whole, and with the help of the Internet and social media, made us collectively blind to other more important things.

Andy Warhol’s legendary 15 minutes of fame has now expanded, with the dubious help of trolls, to include shame and blame, and the result is across all media platforms, we give inordinate attention, good and bad, to say, shameless Kardashian family pronouncements (one K woman elegantly announced recently that everyone wanted to “bone” another K woman) and less attention to things that really matter. Scientific discovery? We’ll wait for the movie. Social ills — well, what does some A-list actor think?

Take the case of El Chapo, now safely back in captivity, who apparently bragged in his controversial secret encounter with Penn and Mexican star Kate del Castillo that he “supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world.”

That is pure evil. But isn’t this notorious criminal also, ludicrously, a man in thrall to celebrity culture?

After all, El Chapo reputedly so desperately wanted to be the star of his own biopic that he was thrilled when del Castillo, who has played crime lords, tweeted several years ago that he could be a “hero”.

The two apparently got in touch, and the rest, give or take prison escape, drug war murders, hundreds of thousands of people dying or ruined from addiction, and their shattered families, becomes a celebrity story worthy of its own movie. (Do not doubt that someone has already approached Penn and del Castillo about making their encounter with El Chapo into a movie.)

It’s maddening to contemplate not only the hypocrisies and silliness of celebrity culture, but our complicity in it. If we didn’t click on every hollow pronouncement and absurdity, every red carpet fashion hit or miss, there wouldn’t be a market for it.

And of course behind that silly culture lies the art — its boldness, its vision, its impact on how we see the world.

Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, who recorded from space perhaps the most touching version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” with its immortal “Ground control to Major Tom” line, made for me the most resonant observation about the different between art and the celebrity culture it has engendered when he commented on why Bowie, a truly great artist, was so passionately interested in space.

Through all the ups and downs of being a star, mused Hadfield, Bowie knew only too well there was a great “beyond.”

The Oscars are in six weeks. Cue the excitement — faux and real — and book a place on the couch. But in order to avoid Award Show Shame, even as I am watching, I will focus on my own version of the great “beyond”. It might just mean organizing my tax receipts.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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